Communication Breakdown: Life Without All Pick
For a brief period, All Pick mode was removed from Ranked Matchmaking, funneling every MMR climber and competitive player into Random Draft and Captain’s Mode. The temporary change was a welcome respite from the usual routine of ranked DoTA—game after game facing Invoker, Spectre, or Outworld Devourer—and a way to try new modes that would for a moment have less than 10 minute wait times. One of the highlights of these modes is that by nature they encouraged more teamwork, more planning, and more incentive to win, especially when you can no longer spam pick your favorite hero.
Picking in Dota presented every player with a social dilemma, where a decision that best benefits the individual can harm the group. Yes, our team really might need a support 
Lion, but what if you really, really want to just play your favorite hero, Elder Titan? There’s always that familiar situation where a team beckons the last player to pick a support, as he’s hovering over the two or three heroes he really wants to play. If you’re the captain, you’re tasked with balancing the best picks against what your teammates want or can actually play. Without a captain in RD, the responsibility of picks is shared across the team. RD and CM pressure that decision towards one that will benefit the group. It also helps that we’re playing “ranked matchmaking”, where ideas like “having fun” are thrown out the window in the name of competition and +25 MMR.
Raising Your Game
We’ve written plenty of posts about strategy, roles, and picks. But ultimately, how much is it possible to employ these tactics in your standard pub game? The highest level of competition is played in Captain’s Mode, where the outcome of nearly every game can be traced back to decisions and errors made during the drafting phase. It helps for professional captains to have a keen sense of the game and the meta. What about the average 3-4k pub player, who has only an approximate knowledge of the complexities of Dota?
The issue in your typical All Pick, ranked game, is that everyone has a say in the matter, or at least feels like they should. Everyone is approximately the same skill level, so who is better fit to make decisions as each person clamors to dictate the best course of action? Fractured groups lead to fractured decision making.
And on the opposite spectrum, group cohesiveness can also lean towards groupthink, where unanimity prevents an objective evaluation of the situation. This is where the role of captains and leaders come into play. It’s no coincidence that many successful captains are support players, as is the case for Secret.Puppey for Team Secret,
PPD for Evil Geniuses, or
xiao8 for LGD-Gaming. Their roles require them to constantly evaluate the game’s situation, dictating where they and their teammates should be. They direct action, but they also delegate and seek outside opinion. Drafting can be a group process, but there’s still an organizational structure on who has the last say. And in late game situations, sometimes the carry should be the one making the calls. The process is fluid and collaborative, and it’s something that pub players can seek to learn from.
Spamming a strong meta hero, learning its intricacies and timings, is one way to climb MMR. But for a moment, players couldn't always play their comfort heroes. All Pick has been Dota’s version of a pick-up game of basketball. Everyone plays with their own agenda, while winning almost becomes secondary. Random Draft and Captain’s Mode raises the bar of competition, by introducing a drafting phase and compelling players to function more like a team. Even in RD, which is still very close to All Pick, the limitations push players to deliberate more on their picks, organizing them into the best possible strategies and lane combinations. Each game of CD presents unfamiliar situations, forcing players to collaborate to survive. It’s a high order to ask a group of five strangers to be a well oiled machine, but why not try? We pick our favorite heroes to try to mimic pros. The next step would be to play like them as well. These modes push us to elevate our game, only if there were more people to play with.
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Actually, it's worse than Enchantress having infinite Impetus, since 1. you can't just get upclose and personal to minimize its extra damage, and 2. it drains serious amount of intelligence.
i wanna CM back
I got +500 mmr in this stage, from 3500 to 4000, like 40 games, I always drafted, even when I wasnt the captain, my captain always understood me, I lost when some scrubs refuse to ear me, I'm so glad to this, I was stuck on that 3600+/- 100, now I can have more decent games =D
Why can't you select your pos in game settings like ap cm rd ( whwn you go carry you need like 15 min to find a game,but as sup 10 sek)like this you always have 1 utility core 1 mid 1 carry 1 roamer/4th and 1 5th pos
No please, i just play Zeus if valve removes all pick ranked i'll back to 3k-2k cause i only can play zeus :P
I would like them to add an all pick mode where you say what role you want to play before hand, or even like league games where you can find a team before and set your roles. It's kinda sad when someone on the team gets forced into a role they don't like or are not comfortable with, and you lose your mmr just because of bad luck when random team gets thrown together.
Likewise if you get lucky and a team that all want to play different positions you have a much higher chance to win.
I also hate the last pick random mid... that insisted on taking mid from the start of the draft.
VOLVO PLS REMOVE AP FOR 1 MORE WEEK
im 10k mmr and i feel offended by this article
If you lost mmr due to no all pick, then you should learn to play more than 3 heroes. That was the best week of my dota life
"...encouraged more teamwork..."
LOLWHAT?
In reality it was like that: lets say I'm a captain and I want to play WR, so I pick WR, I pick Drow to give me damage aura, I pick CM to give me mana regen and of course I pick Dazzle to save my ass and heal me. Teamwork?!...
bad!!!!!!! delete plz!!!!!
Nicely done, Valve.
The problem is that so many people think they are the next Puppey or whoever but of course give themselves mid and then try build a strategy they saw work on a pro game or something.
The problem is that the strategy might not work at that level for any number of reasons, it might not be a good match for that line up or strategy and more importantly, your team mates might not know how to play or be comfortable with the damn heroes you're drafting.
Honestly, ranked Captains Mode should be one pick, one ban per player. I stopped playing captains mode simply cus I grew tired of these people thinking they were awesome leaders while not understanding the first thing about a TEAM game.
That said, I think All Pick is a friggin awful mode for ranked... it's awful in general but... yeah...
DISABLE all pick, DISABLE posibilty of random pick and.. uuuuuaaaahhhhh (angelical voice) we all have a better ranked games..
круто!
I wish Valve would of kept it this way, i was able to get less toxic players (Peru) and was able to get other team mates who helped in the picking phase and throughout the entire game. Since all pick has been back i been spammed with nothing but "Viva Peru" and "Csm" in at least 1 out of every 2 games. I raised my MMR by +250 when we had Random Draft, shame it's back to the pick spamming and feeding again.
Ranked matchmaking is better without all pick